CIS roundup

Excerpt: The U.S. Supreme Court blundered in its recent ruling in Padilla v. Kentucky, so look out for two things to follow on its heels: lots of immigrant criminals will go for – and get – a second bite at the judicial apple, and activist lawyers and ethnic advocacy groups could well rush to push the envelope of criminal alien legal rights.

Excerpt: Yesterday Utah Governor Gary Herbert signed a bill into law requiring Utah employers to use E-Verify to make sure their workers are legal. The bill passed both chambers of the legislature with large margins, making Utah the fourth state to require all employers to verify their workers (the others are Arizona, Mississippi, and South Carolina). Another 10 states require certain groups of employers, usually public agencies and contractors, to verify workers using E-Verify, and nine states have laws reinforcing federal law in other ways

Excerpt: Advocates for illegal aliens must have been horrified to learn over the weekend via a Washington Post article that ICE’s top manager for Detention and Removal Operations, James M. Chaparro, has directed ICE Field Offices to pick up the pace in removing not just aliens convicted of serious crimes, but – gasp! – other illegal aliens found in jails or who ignored previous orders to get out and stay out.

The Post report also included copies of DRO performance evaluation guidelines that – get this – establish numerical productivity benchmarks to help supervisors assess how effective their agents are.

ICE chief John Morton and other public affairs staff quickly issued statements suggesting that Chaparro had gone rogue, but the policy implications are clear: the administration’s axe-murderers-only approach to immigration law enforcement is just not going to cut it. The agency could not credibly claim to have implemented a ‘smarter and better’ immigration enforcement regime that provides a foundation for ‘comprehensive immigration reform’ if the 2010 removal numbers were to drop by 25 percent, as would have been the case under current policies, which try to limit enforcement to illegal aliens with serious criminal convictions.

Excerpt: The Obama Administration’s Labor Department has severely penalized a New Jersey-based software firm for violating the rules of the H-1B program.

Peri Software Solutions Inc. and its president, Sarib Perisamya, were both charged with a series of violations, fined $439,000 and told to pay $1,456,422 in backwages. The Department’s press release also said the ‘company could face a two-year debarment from participating in [the] H-1B program.’

Excerpt: George Will has never been particularly good on immigration, so I was a little surprised by his column calling for an end to automatic citizenship at birth (specifically, for the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens).

There are three issues: legal, empirical, and political. The first is the easiest — there just is no way to argue with a straight face that the drafters of the 14th amendment intended to give citizenship to the children of illegal aliens (Will persuasively cites this law review article by Lino Graglia). In fact, the amendment probably wasn’t meant to apply even to U.S.-born children of legal immigrants who hadn’t yet become citizens, though the Supreme Court decided otherwise in the 1898 Wong Kim Ark decision

Excerpt: Tom Barry is the director of the TransBorder Project at the liberal Center for International Policy in Washington. He works from New Mexico, where for more than 30 years he has done valuable research and writing on public policy issues. I first began learning from his work in the late 1970s, when I was working on a book about a bitter land dispute between the Navajos and Hopis in northeastern Arizona. Peabody Coal and other energy companies insinuated themselves into the inter-tribal fight as it moved to Congress, and Barry’s work helped me understand the land dispute’s broader regional context.

Excerpt: Charles H. Kuck (pronounced ‘cook’), the immediate past president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, clearly knows a lot about immigration law. But if the comments he made recently on his radio program, Immigration Hour, are any indication, he has a few gaps in his knowledge of immigration lobbying in Washington. Here are some excerpts:

The above is a press release from from Center for Immigration Studies. 1522 K St. NW, Suite 820, Washington, DC 20005, (202) 466-8185 fax: (202) 466-8076. Email: center@cis.org. The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent research institution which examines the impact of immigration on the United States.